sábado, 22 de noviembre de 2008

NAVIGATION NOTES

These notes may be useful as you explore these pages:

ARTICLES

These have been ordered into sections (etiquetas):


  • Coaching
  • Comunication
  • Cross Culture
  • General Interest
  • Language Learning
  • Leadership
  • Networking
  • Politics
  • Strategic Planning
    and
  • IN SPANISH

Look for Section (etiquetas) in the right hand columns to choose your subject matter of interest.


Books Recommended

The books included so far are by no means necessarily the greatest books on the subjects of my professional interest but they are those that have had the most profound affect on me at one particular time and probably influenced many of the decisions I have taken during my career. Friends and colleagues will notice that I have ended up representing or working with many of the authors.

Rather than giving my own biased view of these books, however, the corresponding link will take you the Amazon page for these books, where you will be able to see a summary of the customer reviews and the average ranking . I have found this a really useful tool for deciding which books to order through Amazon in addition to reading the professional reviews and browsing the random page feature.

I will be most interested in receiving your feedback on these books and others on similar subjects that you may have read and I would like to think that at some stage I can start a new category of "Books Recommended to Me".

RECOMMENDED LINKS

This is not an exhaustive list of my favourite sites, but it does contain links to many of the organizations and people mentioned in the articles and/or whom I feel I can responsibly recommend to friends, clients and colleagues.

El Coaching Transformacional




Por Thomas Crane, Autor de “The Heart of Coaching”.

¿Cómo enfrentar al ejecutivo talentoso, pero que trata mal a su personal?; ¿O al especialista que teme a los equipos de trabajo?; ¿Qué hacer con un gerente que no se compromete ni quiere sostener ningún enfrentamiento?

Una solución es despedirlo, pero antes de hacerlo habría que pensar… soy yo parte del problema?

Es ahí que surge el concepto de coaching tansformacional, una herramienta que busca mejorar la conducta, no solamente de una persona o grupo, sino de la organización completa, partiendo con uno mismo.

Tal como planteo en mi libro “The Heart of Coaching”, cada día más líderes se encuentran frustrados frente a la necesidad de “hacer más con menos” e implementar culturas de alto rendimiento.

El Coaching Transformacional provee al líder los herramientas para desarrollar, enriquecer y reforzar los talentos naturales de su equipo ayudándoles a cuestionar sus creencias, conductas, la calidad de sus relaciones y sus resultados y le hace receptiva a recibir e invitar la retroalimentación sobre su propio desempeño

El nuevo líder debe remplazar su paradigma de ser “jefe de las personas ” para uno mas saludable y sostenible de ser “coach para la gente”. Así los los miembros de su equipo aprenderán a transformarse en coaches entre ellos mismos, impactando no solamente los resultados individuales y de su equipo sino el desempeño y efectividad de la organización entera.


Una Cultura de Coaching de alto rendimiento es aquella donde todos los miembros de una organización se involucren en conversaciones respetuosas de coaching, sin restricciones, sobre cómo pueden mejorar sus relaciones de trabajo y su rendimiento. Aprenden a valorar y usar feedback, como herramienta de aprendizaje para lograr altos niveles de responsabilidades a nivel personal, desarrollo profesional, mejores relaciones laborales, mejoramiento continuo y satisfacción del cliente.

¡BIENVENIDOS! (en español)

Bienvenidos a mi nuevo blog cuyo objetivo principal es comuniciar ideas para construir confianza y mejorar resultados cuando personas, organizaciones y comunidades necesitan colaborar.

Tras 30 años en Chile el el campo de las comunicaciones, la capacitación y desarrollo organzacional, sentí que ya es hora de construir puentes con mis contactos en este continente y a través del mundo para compartir algunos de las experiencias y recursos que he acumulado y seguir aprendiendo para que estemos mejor preparados para enfrentar los desafìos de este "Brave New World" (¡¡Mundo Felíz!!).

Les invito a navegar, comentar, compartir y ojalá contribuir!

PARA VER LOS ARTÍCULOS EN ESPAÑOL VER INDICE O CLICK AQUI

Philip Ray

The Challenges of Globlisation


Cross-Culture
(Extracted from www.crossculture.com with permission)

As organisations become increasingly international, there are many more demands on the senior executive team. It is not easy to get your message across and convince people with the same background – but the challenge is greater when they have different values and beliefs, organise their world in different ways, and communicate and listen differently.

The Lewis Model of Culture (click on graphic or click here for a multimedia demonstration) is the most practical theoretical approach to classifying cultures, and the easiest to apply to your work.

Demands of Globalisation

Globalisation creates increasingly complex demands :

European cross-border mergers and acquisitions have increased dramatically in recent years.
Off-shoring is no longer done for purely cost-saving purposes. Next Generation Off-Shoring is also down to skills shortages, and for innovation. Duke Fuqua Business School have forecast that off-shoring of R&D will increase by around 65% and of engineering and product design by 80% in the next couple of years (click here for further details).

According to a survey by KPMG, 83% of mergers and acquisitions produce no value for the shareholders. The report concluded that ‘linguistic and cultural divides may explain why deals between the USA and continental Europe were least likely to boost shareholder value.’

In 2006 Wal-Mart pulled out of the German market, losing 1 Billion USD. Analysts said culture was behind the failure – German consumers simply did not like being greeted with a toothy grin as they entered the stores.

A recent Hay Group report found that only 28% of executives felt they had done a good job of cultural due diligence before the deal – though 72% considered such an assessment of critical importance.

Globalisation is a fact of life (click here for an article containing ideas on globalisation). Few of us – whether in business, government or non-governmental organisations – will be able to escape working with people from different cultures from our own. This places unprecedented demands on our ability to understand other ways of thinking, behaving and communicating. Without preparation this can lead to unnecessary stress and a feeling of frustration and helplessness.

No matter how strong the business logic is, nor how good your systems and processes are, you should remember that ‘culture eats processes for lunch!’

If you can pull it off by investing time in developing your personal and organisational skills to make culture work for you rather than against you, you can achieve rare competitive advantage.
Cultural interaction is a business process that needs to be managed – it cannot be left to chance.

For further information watch this section, visit the website http://www.crossculture.com/ or contact me directly.





Copyright © 2008 Richard Lewis Communications. All Rights Reserved

Tom Crane's new Blog





Coaching Cultures During Times Like These
November 18, 2008
(Congratulations to Tom Crane author of Crane Consulting for the publication of his new Blog. We reproduce his opening article below.






"The Heart of Coaching" was written to provide leaders and their teams a universal, systematic, and pragmatic way of creating coaching relationships, and then planning and conducting coaching conversations that ended up serving both the coach and the coachee. When it first appeared 10 years ago, the world never contemplated such times as we are experiencing today. The emotional stresses brought about by the economic meltdown are immense and far reaching.

It is precisely during times of emotional stress and deep human challenges that the core skills of coaching come into play. In "normal" times, it is difficult enough to build trusting relationships and hold helpful coaching conversations based in candid feedback that actually led to enhanced business results. Overlay the current context of what is going on in today's global for-profit businesses and not-for-profit communities, and you have a powder keg of emotional energy that can bring people down further.

What people need during times like these is resilience - the ability to bounce back from and effectively deal with the negative events of the times. That often begins with having people around you being willing to listen.

At the heart of a "coaching culture" are people acting as coaches for one another. They CHOOSE to respond with compassion. When leaders and teammates engaging in a coaching conversation have both the capacity and willingness to respond to their colleagues with heartfelt listening, empathy, and a sincere desire to be helpful, they can change everything for their coachee. We directly work with empathy in our coaching workshops as a natural expression of one's Emotional Intelligence, and propose that empathy does not mean one necessarily agreeing with their coachee - but being able to relate to their human experience - and to do that without blame, criticism, or judgment.

These times call forth the very best of us as human beings, and remind us to come from caring, compassionate concern. This is one significant way we can maintain the tone of hopefulness as we wade through these rough waters together.




http://theheartofcoaching.typepad.com/theheartofcoaching/

Tom Crane, author, "The Heart of Coaching", Crane Consulting, http://www.craneconsulting.com/


©2008 Crane Consulting. All Rights Reserved.
How to Have Influence
Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg
(Extracted from MITSloan Management Review Rehttp://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2008/fall/13/ )

In business and in personal life, people look for easy solutions to solve complex problems. Unfortunately, most quick fixes don’t work because the problem is rarely fed by a single cause. If you want to confront persistent problems, the authors argue, you need to apply several different kinds of influence strategies simultaneously. Their approach is based on three separate studies — two examining organizational issues within companies and a third exploring destructive individual behaviors such as smoking, overeating and excessive alcohol use. The authors document the success of this multipronged approach across different problem domains (from entrenched cultural issues in companies to leader-led change initiatives to stubborn personal challenges). They found that those who employed only one influence strategy (for example, managers offered training, redesigned the organization or held a high-visibility retreat) were far less likely to achieve significant results than those who used four or more sources of influence in combination. The same went for those tackling personal challenges. Many had attempted to alter their behavior by using a single approach (joining a gym, following prescriptions in a book or attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) — but nearly all had failed.

Using examples from such companies as AT&T, Lockheed Martin, OGE Energy and Spectrum Health Systems, the authors describe six influence strategies. The first two, personal motivation and ability, relate to sources of influence within individuals that determine their behavioral choices. The next two, social motivation and ability, relate to how other people affect an individual’s choices. And the final two, structural motivation and ability, encompass the role of nonhuman factors, such as compensation systems, the role of physical proximity on behavior, and technology. “Too often,” the authors argue, "[leaders] bet on a single source of influence rather than tapping a diverse arsenal of strategies. We have learned that the main variable in success or failure is not which sources of influence leaders choose. By far the more important factor is how many.”

Joseph Grenny is cochairman of VitalSmarts LC, a global training and consulting company headquartered in Provo, Utah. David Maxfield is vice president of research at VitalSmarts. Andrew Shimberg is president of nGenera Talent, a talent development and organizational change company in Austin, Texas. Comment on this article or contact the authors at smrfeedback@mit.edu.

Politics meets innovation on way to White House

Politics meets innovation on way to White House

Harvey Schachter, November 17, 2008 at 8:57 AM EST
(At the risk of violating copyright laws and whilst I find the "right" way to do this, I am posting this excellent article on how Obama has generated a massive world-changing wave of trust which a great friend from San Diego forwarded to me. PR)

A knock against Barack Obama in his campaign for the U.S. presidency was that he lacked executive experience. But nothing could be further from the truth, asserts Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab strategic consultancy.

"Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: A new kind of political organization for the 21st century," he writes on Harvard Business Online.

Here's what we can learn from the president-elect.

A self-organization design


We're used to thinking about organizations as either tall or flat, but those are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think in two dimensions: Tall organizations lead unresponsively while flat organizations respond uncontrollably. Mr. Obama's organization combined the virtues of both organizations through the game-changing power of self-organization. It was spherical, with a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.

Seek elasticity of resilience

His organization was built to remain resilient to turbulence. When challenger John McCain attacked Mr. Obama with negative ads in September, instead of retaliating quickly and decisively with its own ads, Mr. Obama's team responded furiously in exactly the opposite way - with record-breaking fundraising. "That's resilience," Mr. Haque says, the team reacted "to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources."

Minimize strategy

His campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naive sense
- as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources on dominating the news cycle, strong-arming his party, or cleverly undercutting competitors' positions with nuanced statements. "They realized that strategy too often kills a deeply lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning," he says.

Maximize purpose

Mr. Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign, Mr. Haque contends. It was larger and more urgent: To change the world. "Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: Yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things. And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can," he observes.

Broaden unity

Marketers traditionally segment and target. They slice and dice, dividing markets into tinier and tinier bits. But they can be hapless at unifying segments. Mr. Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification. His words to his country were that they are "not a collection of Red States and Blue States - We are the United States of America."

Thicken power

The power many corporations wield is thin - the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power inspires, leads, and engenders belief.

The power of an ideal


Remember that there is nothing more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative than an ideal, Mr. Haque says. "Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing - absent, bankrupt, stolen - from your economy, industry, or market? What ideals will you fight and struggle for - and live? Because the ultimate problem with industrial-era business was, as Wall Street has so convincingly demonstrated, this: There weren't any."

Datos Profesionales